Small Things
by DeejayMil
Summary: 1995 is the year he quits his job to find himself. Instead, he finds Emily. It's a succession of small things, small changes, and they culminate in the biggest change of them all. He only wishes he was big enough to face it.
1. 1995

**Chapter One: 1995**

 **.**

 **AN: For my amazing beta, Greeneyedconstellations,**

 **Without whom I would have stopped writing months ago. She's an absolute inspiration.**

 **Good luck with the next stage of your life you're moving onto, Green. I'm endlessly proud to call you my friend.**

 **Fair warning that this story involves adult content and adult issues including adultery, references to recreational drug abuse, and our favourite characters at the crossroads of their lives where they weren't quite old enough to be sensible yet.**

 **.**

 **.**

 _"_ _It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."_

 **Arthur Conan Doyle** , **_The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes_**

 **.**

 **January**

It's a little thing that changes his life.

Miniscule. Inconsequential. As insignificant as a scuffed shoe, an invalidated bus ticket laying forgotten at the bottom of a person's bag, the tattered corner of a well-read book. Something so every day, so mundane, that it becomes absolutely all-important.

It's a broken coffee mug that changes his life.

Aaron Hotchner gets up one morning, dresses impeccably, kisses his fiancée goodbye on his way to his job as a federal prosecutor, and on the way out of the door, he breaks his favourite coffee mug. The one Haley brought him for passing his bar exam. The one he's drunk from every day since.

Aaron Hotchner, despite the complaints in his file and from his superiors that he can be reactionary, hot-headed, reckless, is a man of habit. And on this one day, this one insignificant day, he breaks one of his longest held ones.

"Never mind," Haley says, pulling a face at the splatters of coffee on the already-stained cream carpeting. He's staring at it, frozen with one hand on his suitcase, and he isn't sure why he feels so unsettled by the sight. "We can clean up the mess and buy another." She's looking at the carpeting too, that stained and threadbare carpeting, and he knows she's thinking about more. More than this. A nicer home, a nicer life. Something different. The wedding he owes her.

A change.

He kisses her goodbye, murmurs something conciliatory about the mug, and goes to work.

Later that day, a case hits his desk. The murder of a family, and entire family, and the suspect is smiling in the photo they have of him.

There's a broken mug by the mother's hand, the barest hint of '#1 DAD' visible against her painted nails.

He stares at that mug. A little thing.

He's twenty-four and reckless. This one small action leads to tears later that night, panic the next day, worry the next week, and, finally, a calm sense of having done the right thing when he fills out the application to become a field agent with the FBI. He'd already passed the academy, before he'd settled back into a desk job and mediocrity. But this is later.

Sick of cleaning up after mugs that have already been broken, he quits his job that day.

 **.**

 **February**

It's the little things that make life bearable.

The burn of whiskey in the back of her throat or the bitter coating of a pill lingering on her teeth and tongue for hours after it disappears down her throat. She dabbles. She experiments. She flaunts with danger, the little dangers, because she can't remember how to be alive except to be reckless.

The little things like biting down on the cigarette just as it's lit, the filter resisting the pressure, straining the smoke through her teeth. Little things like the 69% she got on the exam the month before, followed by the 61% this time around. It's just a little slip. Not much. But it's enough.

She thinks she might be slipping herself, but Emily Prentiss has never been one to ask for help. Not after Matthew. Not after Rome. Not after the catastrophe she made of the man who held her hand and risked everything for her.

Little things like nameless men, nameless beds, nameless pleasures.

She might be slipping, but at least she knows how to be alive.

 **.**

 **March**

His first posting is security detail to a US Ambassador. Ambassador Elizabeth Prentiss. It's a boring post, she's hardly a target, but the current talks she's involved in are making everyone edgy. And it's also a prestigious post. He's warned, over and over and over again, that his conduct is absolutely integral to his continued employment.

He has a gun at his hip, a badge on his belt, the power to stop the broken mugs from ever happening again, and he's giddy with it.

"I don't like that they're sending you away," Haley murmurs, standing in the middle of their battered living room with her hands tucked into the pockets of his jumper she's wearing, hiding her ring. "It's a six month posting, Aaron. What am I supposed to do for six months?"

"Learn to knit?" he teases, cupping her chin and pulling her close. It's not so long. Not so far. She'll be fine. He needs this, needs _something_ , because he's twenty-four and feels three times as old.

The first week in DC, he's on his best behaviour. Same for the second. But he's here for six months – why not live a little?

The third week, on his off-duty night, the other men invite him out and he drinks them under the table. That, and his work on the firing range every morning when they meet up for practise, earns him their respect.

It's a heady feeling, being respected.

And he's good at his job, so he's sure he deserves it.

 **.**

 **April**

She finds a boyfriend in March, and in April during a fight about something so small she can't even remember how it began, he grabs her chin hard enough to bruise. His mouth is inches from hers, his eyes hot and precarious, and there's a cold power to the fingers and the scratchy nails digging into her jaw that reminds her of her own mortality. For a moment, just a moment, Emily Prentiss goes quiet and still and remembers that she's human.

Just a moment.

Then she knees him in the dick and tells him to _get the fuck out and don't come back._ Surprisingly, he goes. He leaves a narrow line of yellow-green bruises along the line of her mouth, the scent of nicotine in her usually clean sheets, and a startling realization that she can't do this anymore.

She's not sure what, but something needs to change. Starting off small.

On the way home from a lecture, she stops at a different café for her coffee, one where no one knows her name.

It's a start. A small one. But a start.

 **.**

 **May**

The posting is two months of dullness and Aaron (Hotch, the men call him Hotch, and he encourages that because it's a step away from being meek) grates with it. The tedium gets under his skin like a creeping fog, making him feel hot and edgy and a little impractical. One of the men offers to teach him to box in between shifts, and he takes up the offer and glories a little in the ease of it. Even the frequent phone calls with Haley hardly help, and he's tired of her monotony, her never-changing stories about her work, her nothing life, her small worries. He doesn't wear his ring and he's sick of being the same.

Elizabeth Prentiss is polite and watchful. He's always professional around her, always courteous, and he does his job. No one gets near her.

Then something changes. He arrives for his shift one day, at the Prentiss's home (mansion, really, it's ridiculous. More than the Ambassador title, this proves the family came from money, and he's a little disgruntled by this), and the air has changed minutely. A suitcase against the hallway door, crooked and battered and dropped without care. A coat across the usually spotless dining room table, and the sleeves are frayed. When he glances down at it on his way through, he smells smoke and a musky perfume he recognises from _somewhere_. Not Haley. Haley had never worn this particular scent.

It's not his job, this moving through the home, he's out of place. But it's something different in places where everything has been the same for over two months, and that edgy neediness is riding him now. He's _interested_.

He finds her in the kitchen, making herself a sandwich with a steak knife and far too much jam. There must be some noise, some small indication of him entering the room, because she cocks her head back to look at him. There's jam on her mouth.

"Who the fuck are you?" are the first words Emily Prentiss ever says to him, followed shortly by, "Oh, another fed." He's dismissed, for a moment, in favour of the sandwich.

Later he feels like a fool, standing there, saying nothing, staring at her hands on the bread and her bitten nails. Her clothes are dark, her gaze darker, and when she looks at him again, differently this time, and smiles, the expression is cocky and challenging and dangerous.

And they don't speak again until a week later when the perimeter alarm alerts him to a disturbance in the early hours of the morning. He draws his gun, draws his courage, and follows that alarm until he finds her sitting on the edge of the lawn, one foot hanging exactly where the alarm line sits, and she's smiling that smile again with a cigarette hanging loosely between her teeth.

"Aaron, isn't it?" she asks, flicking the cigarette between two fingers and leaving a red trail on his retinas for a heartbeat of time as she waves it. Blows out smoke in a slow stream, her tongue darting across lips that are dark in the moonlight, and he remembers the jam.

"Hotch," he corrects her, and holsters his weapon. Stands next to her, unsure, feeling unsure of his footing around this stranger that reminds him, somehow, of himself. He can see himself in her eyes. They're not easy eyes to look into. "You did that on purpose. Ma'am."

"Maybe," she murmurs, closing her eyes and tilting her head back. She's not dressed for bed, despite the hour. The move displays her neck, the long line of her throat, and curve of her jaw. There's a fading bruise on the line of her jawbone. He stares at that bruise and something instinctual, protective, growls in his chest and wants him to touch it, to ask what happened; as though she's Haley and he has the right. Then the moment breaks. Her eyes open, she offers him the smoke and smiles. "Maybe I wanted a chance to see if you're as interesting as you seem. The only interesting thing in this shithole."

He accepts. Beyond the nicotine bite, he can taste her chap-stick. The smallest flavour of her.

 **.**

 **June**

He wears his suits like a second skin, so comfortably at home in them she wonders if he sleeps in them, showers in them. She even, snidely, wonders if he fucks in them. She bets he does. Bets that he takes those large, careful hands and that careful suit and brings his wife or girlfriend—or boyfriend, whatever—to whatever end he wants them to without even breaking a sweat or creasing his tie. _Ma'am, I'm at your pleasure,_ she imagines him saying, doing up his zip and covering himself with an elegant twist of those hands. _Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am._ He talks to her like she's her mother, perfunctory. Polite. His hands at his side, motionless.

She's beginning, dangerously, to obsess over those hands.

There was no missing his gaze that first morning in her mother's perfectly presented kitchen, the one she'd never cooked a meal in in her fucking life. It lingered, at first, on her mouth. Then lower, despite his clear attempt to hide the dip in his eye-line. She had wondered, at the time, if he liked what he saw, and then chalked up that momentary neediness to being lonely and the still-stiff crink to her jaw.

There's no missing the way he handles a gun, almost obscenely lovingly. The weapon dark and deadly and fascinating, cradled in those hands that she has no trouble imagining around her hips or her waist. He'd lift her as easily as he does his weapon, but with half the amount of love. She can see in his eyes how much he covets the power the gun gives him, some misguided need to overcompensate for his masculinity by using it as an extension of self. She should mock him for that. The Emily of a month ago would have mocked him.

But behind it all, that insecure need for power and machismo, there's a kindness to his dark gaze and a nimbleness to his fingers that she delights, secretly, in. But she doesn't tell him this.

She bets he has a temper. Bets he's reckless. In fact, in the end, if Emily had ever actually laid money down on her assumptions about Aaron Hotchner, she'd have been eating beans for months. Because she was right about a lot of them… but she failed to factor in his inconsolable need to be a _gentleman._

Her ex shows up one weekend, late June, and the weather is hot and her temper is small. She confronts him outside the grounds, sick of her mother's careful dinners and careful poise and careful fucking _life_. They fight, of course, but she kisses him first because she's not careful, not safe, and when they'd been going good, they'd been great together.

And because she craves her own destruction, she sees that now.

She kisses him, his hand sneaks into the waistband of her pants, and she wonders how far she wants to take this at two in the afternoon with the metal of a shitty station-wagon burning the bare leg revealed under the hem of her too-short-for-decorum-shorts. The hated shorts. Only worn to piss off her mother, and they'd done the job nicely, as did the top that showed off far too much skin, almost too much tit, and just enough stomach.

"No," she says, because she's not _that_ destructive, and he'd almost hit her once. She steps away. They end up fighting, and she wishes she'd done this inside now, because she kind of wants to see her mother's face when the word _cunt_ is juxtaposed against the perfect showroom set-up of the living room that they're not supposed to live in.

He raises his hand, maybe to gesture, maybe to strike, and she cocks her chin and stares him down. _Do it. I dare you. Try it._

It's reckless. It's a small, small show of the lack of anything he has over her.

It's a worthless, powerless gesture, because she can see Aaron standing against the gate behind him, expression is cool and gaze is unwaveringly locked on her face. He has a gun and a temper and a chauvinistic need to play the hero, and she wonders what he'll do if her ex hits her.

The answer is nothing, because the hand never falls. When she walks over to Aaron, standing in the full light with no shame of spying, he raises an eye-brow at her.

"I can look after myself," she challenges him, and there's a single drop of sweat on his upper lip, brought on by the heat or the strain of standing by, she doesn't know which.

"I know, Ma'am," he answers mildly, and just like that her mouth is dry and her belly is twisting. She pushes by, and he smells clean, sharp. Real. He follows, too close, close enough that if she stops he'll be on top of her with his hands and his scent and that flick of sweat. "I was going to let you hit him first."

She stops. He doesn't crash into her, attuned to her movements, and looks down at her, unblinking.

 _He's a puppy_ , she realizes now, looking up into that expression. A puppy, so sure of himself, so sure of his world. Sure that she's good, a good person, that they're all capable of being better. Still growing into the gun-belt that's too big for him, the power that sits so strangely on his shoulders. Just a kid playing at being grown up.

But then again, she is too, really. And he fascinates her.

 **.**

 **July**

It's a small thing. Her car breaks down. He helps her fix it. It's a late, lazy July evening, and the oncoming night is noisy with bugs and birds and the humming whine of a city taking a breath of relief after the stifling heat.

It's still warm. He's in his uniform, just off shift, so he puts his belt to the side and covers it with his suit jacket; covers his gun and his badge and for now, he's just Aaron and she's Emily. There's grease on his hands, on his pants, and she's laughing, smoking, seated on the side of the open hood with her shirt dark in places where the sweat has marked it, and hair tied back messily and stringy from the heat. Her skin is shiny-bright, and when she leans towards him to pass him a tool, she smells sharp, clean, _good_. When he kisses her, once, twice, the first time, she tastes of mint, of nicotine, of sweat and hunger and _want_. Tastes of danger and betrayal, and he's hooked from the first flick of her tongue.

It's a small mistake. A big mistake. Somewhere in the middle

All of the above.

He fucks her in the backseat of her car while the cicadas outside narrate their mistakes, and that's not right, because really, she's just as much a participant as he is. She keeps him guessing, keeps him gasping, and it takes all his concentration just to keep up with her, the way her body moves, what makes her grind or moan or choke. When he gets home later that night and showers, washing her from his skin, he finds red lines on his back from her nails and the dark bruising shape of her mouth on his hip.

She's not Haley and she's not familiar, and it's gloriously human and so, so wrong.

And he realizes, halfway through, when he's buried inside her, hurtling towards the edge and she's already twice-over, that he could easily learn to crave this feeling of living, of life, of desperate, unstoppable recklessness.

It's their first time.

It's not their last.

 **.**

 **August**

It's a six month posting, so she knows he'll be gone by the time she goes home again for Thanksgiving. That's life at her mom's. A constant rotation of staff, of help, of homes. Why should now be any different?

The last week they can feel time ticking away and a needy kind of desperation seems to take over them both. That last week is the first time they fuck around while he's on duty, and the only concession she lets him make is to holster and put aside his weapon before she drags him into her, her arse perched on the bathroom sink and his hands settled on her sides holding her steady. The whole time he's moving inside her, breath hot and ragged and becoming edged with need, her eyes are locked over his shoulder, on the dark shape of his gun on the rim of the bath. She thinks of his hands on the gun as he runs them across her skin and she think so his finger on the trigger as he slips them inside her, and she thinks of him tracing the cold-metal barrel across her collarbone as she comes.

She'll never admit it, but after that day every time she sees him armed, sees him in uniform, she can feel that coiling tension, like her skin is on too tight and something needs to give.

The last time, he fucks up. He's moving fast, hands bruising, just how she likes it, but when he's done and slumped against her, putting himself back together, his arms tighten around her for just a second. An embrace. And she lets herself be held as his mouth settles on her shoulder, a butterfly kiss, a trailing touch of lips to sweaty skin. It's touching. It's almost romantic. Her heart skips and he feels it do so with his mouth. It's a hint of something more.

It's the most dangerous thing they've done yet.

But they never speak of it, because he leaves that night and she leaves the next morning, and all she has left of him is the memory of his eyes, his hands, and a vague idea that somewhere he still exists.

Aaron. Hotch. That's all she knows. A cocky, arrogant, gentlemanly sonofabitch with hands that fascinate her and a filthy turn of mouth in bed. It's probably for that best that that's all she knows, because she also suspects he has a life somewhere else, a girlfriend maybe, and that this is going to haunt him. There's no guilt in her mind for that part of it. His life, his cock, and if he chose to betray some other woman, that's not on her shoulders. She's twenty-years-old, and the weight of the world is firmly on someone else's shoulders.

She figures that's the end of it.

She's wrong.

 **.**

 **September**

He goes home and Haley is delighted. As soon as he sees her, the guilt is crippling. What he's done. What he did.

He tells her.

They fight. Not small fights. Big ones.

She leaves, twice. Comes back, both times. He doesn't deserve that. She cries, constantly. She doesn't deserve that.

He cries too, once, but the tears are hateful and he's glad she's not there to see. He wishes she'd hit him, just once, but she's not the type and they've never had violence in their home; this would be a shitty time to start.

Their home?

Not anymore. Gone as surely as if he'd taken a match to it himself, gleefully, maybe lighting it with the trailing remains of one of Emily's perpetually lit cigarettes.

"What's her name?" Haley says from the door of the bedroom, and he's on the bed, curled up small and heartsore, and he tells her. Tells her everything. The jam and the cigarettes, the reckless thrill of it, of Emily. His boredom, the needy edginess, the itchy feeling of everything being the same. Maybe he tells her too much. The arch of Emily's ankle, the shift of bones in her wrist. It's a confession, his confession. Haley is silent.

But she stays, and he doesn't deserve that. It hangs over their head and it's carved in every part of her posture. When she looks at him, he can see it in her eyes. She won't touch him. Her mouth twists if he tries.

But she stays.

 **.**

 **October**

There's a man at his second posting, when he's one-month home and things are still wrong. A man with an arrogance around him that even Hotch at his worst has never worn, and a casual indifference to the opinions of others that Hotch is sorely jealous of.

"So," the man says, leaning over his desk and beaming down at him. His clothes are rich, his cologne richer, and he wears his status easily. _Yes, I'm FBI,_ his bearing says. _You've got nothing on this._ "You're the hotshot we've been hearing about. Highest scores in your class at the academy, some bigwig prosecutor, and you've got the glowing recommendation of the Ambassador Prentiss on your resume. And how old are you? Twenty-four?"

Twenty-five now, but Hotch doesn't say that, just smiles and accepts an invitation to the firing range with the man. His name, he finds out later, is David Rossi. He's a profiler, from Quantico, specializing in human behaviour. He's married, his second, and he professes to 'dabbling' with writing. He's fascinating. He's different.

And he's sorely interested in what Hotch can offer him. Hotch makes a call, a risky, reckless call, and he saves eight lives. Rossi watches it happen, and when the adrenaline has faded and Hotch looks to the man for feedback, all he does is nod.

"We don't have a team, just me and Gideon," Rossi says, three days before he's due to leave, his consultation almost over. "But if you ever skip on over to Quantico… look me up, Hotshot. We might have a place for you."

 _Kid has ambition,_ Hotch knows his superiors say about him. _Probably too much. Cocky. Too sure of himself. Reckons he's gonna get a foot in a Unit Chief position by thirty-five._

They're wrong.

He's sure he'll have it by thirty.

 **.**

 **November**

It's a small thing.

Smaller, in fact, than even Emily realizes. Except, not small for long, and not small once she notices.

Far too big when she notices.

She suspects. The test costs a dollar, in a gaudy pink and blue box, and buying it feels like conceding to the possibility of a nightmare returning. She's on the pill. This isn't possible.

But it absolutely is.

There's a panic attack whispering in her breath as she sits in the waiting room at the doctors, and the receptionist knows. She's brought water, a consoling hand, and the lady whispers that _it's okay, love, you're okay. Whatever it is, it isn't the end,_ which feels almost mocking to be saying in a _doctors_ of all places. And wrong. Because this will be the end of her, this second mistake, because she doesn't even know his real name, and Matthew isn't here to catch her this time.

And it is the end.

 _Sixteen weeks_ , they tell her, and she has to ask them to clarify twice. That night she strips naked in her bathroom, in front of the full-length mirror, while her roommate argues with her boyfriend over the phone outside the door. Stares at her body, at the lines and curves of it; the shape of her tits, the bony point to her hips, the coltish awkwardness of her bare legs, the smooth flat expanse of her abdomen. Turns to the side. Impossible. She'd know.

The slightest misshape. The smallest curve.

Impossible.

 **.**

 **December**

She does something reckless, because she's scared and alone and she doesn't know his name, and she can't do this again. It's crazy. Insane. The Emily of three months ago would have hated her for it. The Emily of this month is rugged against the cold, the bitter cold threatening snow, and her thick coat hides what can't be hidden. It's in her posture, her movements, her hands always moments from darting to her belly, to the life she's unwillingly carrying but even more unwilling to cease carrying, the nervous twitch to her eyes and throat.

There was a mobile on Hotch's belt, a chunky, bricklike thing, but she'd never bothered to find out the number attached to it. Never thought there'd be a point.

Her mother, on the other hand, could recite the name of every staff member, every security detail, every cook or cleaner or maid, for the last damn decade. A terrifying skill. One Emily had scoffed as useless, as small.

In this moment, it's anything but small.

"Aaron?" her mother says, one eyebrow raising, and they're eating meatloaf and the smell of it makes Emily uneasy. "Whatever for, Emily?"

And Emily is staring at her plate, at the meatloaf her mom didn't cook for her, and she's horrified to feel her eyes burn, her face itch, the unwanted life in her reacting to that distress and moving about uncertainty. She won't be able to hide it much longer. She can barely hide it now. But she's small, the life is small too, and that protects her.

"Oh, _Emily,_ " Elizabeth says, her fork clattering, and Emily had always thought her mom was clueless about her, but she'd apparently been wrong about that too. Her mom was attuned, so painfully attuned, and she knew from the tears and the shake to Emily's shoulders and the terror, the utter terror, of being alone in this moment.

"I don't know what to do," Emily says, her hands touching the shape of her stomach, and Elizabeth does nothing but hold her tight for the first time since she was a girl. It's unfamiliar. New.

It's not small.

And Elizabeth is anything but useless. It takes three hours and she has a phone number, an address, and if Emily had given her a little longer, she'd probably have his blood type and fucking social as well. She gives her the options. She doesn't give her the answer. _This is your call,_ she says and, _but I'm here if you need me_ and she doesn't point out how badly Emily has fucked up.

It's a week before Christmas, the flights are clogged, and he lives in Seattle of all places. But a phone call is too much, an email not enough, and the Prentiss's have no trouble getting on a plane.

It's a week before Christmas and her winter coat hides her stomach when she raises a knuckle to the peeling paint of a shabby apartment door and knocks three times, low and slow. He opens it, smiling, with paint on his chin. There's a ring on his finger she's never seen before. From inside the warm apartment, a woman is laughing. Music plays. She can smell roast, perfume, something sweet and childlike. He has a family, a life, something of which she has neither.

She lives in a mansion with a mother she doesn't understand, and he lives in a shithole with the life she suddenly realizes she coverts. And she's going to destroy it for him, just like Matthew. Just like the girl she used to be.

"Hi," she says simply, and he says nothing.


	2. 1996

**Chapter Two: 1996**

 **.**

 **.**

 **January**

He spends Christmas in a hotel and New Year's drinking to forget.

Forget Haley's expression as she'd packed his bags for him, slipping her ring into the front pocket with a ruthless twist of her slim fingers; forget how _vulnerable_ Emily had looked in her thick coat, the one that was ratty at the sleeves from her picking at it, huddled into herself in the doorway with her eyes wide and mouth downward.

Mid-January finds him apartment searching. Every one he looks at is somehow wrong; the wrong colour, too shabby, too far from work. Eventually, he gives up. This one, Haley would have loved. This one is nicer than the home he'd destroyed. This one has a spare room for a nursery.

He practically runs from that one and he can tell the realtor is confused, but he can't spare the empathy to care. Instead, he goes back to the hotel, fills a blank hotel-issued mug with cheap scotch, and continues his quest to feel nothing.

When he wakes up in the morning, he's still dressed, asleep on the couch with his mouth sour, and the mug is broken. He leaves it for housekeeping to clean up, and doesn't go back until he's sure it's gone. He's never felt smaller, never more insignificant, than the day he ran from a mug.

He gets the news a week before the month is out. He's being transferred. David Rossi got his wish. He's to start at Quantico in three weeks.

He leaves a forwarding address on Haley's answering machine and, after a beat, does the same for Emily.

Neither respond, and that's about what he deserves.

 **.**

 **February**

She ignores him until she can't anymore, because she'd seen in his eyes the ruin of a man that night she'd first gone to him. Seen the hate aimed at her from his girlfriend— _fiancée_ , there was a ring—and she can't face that hate again. Until this moment, Emily had believed she was unflappable, uncaring, untouched by anything anyone threw her way.

Now, she knows she isn't. The woman's hate, because Emily doesn't know her name and doesn't ever want to know it, this woman she hurt with her selfishness, burns her like nothing else ever has.

Emily thinks it might be because she knows she deserves so much more than just hate. It's too late to repent, too late to fix anything, so she hides and she hides and she refuses to be herself anymore, because being meek is so much easier.

 **.**

 **February**

As the life in her grows, she's alone. She stays at her shared apartment until the curve of her belly is too pronounced to hide, and then she slinks back to her mom's. Elizabeth isn't there. The staff are dismissed. She's away, in Greece or Rome or wherever, and if she knew how much Emily was hurting, there's still no guarantee she'd return.

Quiet nights pass as the date of her destruction ticks closer. Emily looks at photo albums and she can see history repeating itself. Elizabeth young, not as wild as Emily, but more than who she is now… until the photos change and it's not a man on her arm or a smile on her face, but a weary resignation and a baby in faded blue and ruffled frills. The night Emily was born, Elizabeth had stopped being Elizabeth and just become Mom, and Emily can't think of that without her heart twisting in her chest.

She's twenty-one years old, and not done being Emily yet.

He finds her. She's alone for two weeks before he finds her. She should have guessed he would, is surprised it took him this long.

The knock is cautious, perfunctory. She opens the door, the sound echoing in the empty house that's never been a home and won't be changed by the addition of another lonely Prentiss, and examines his hands instead of his face, because unlike his face, they haven't changed. They're still careful, still big, still motionless by his side like it's an eternity ago and they're new to each other again.

His face, when she finally looks up to meet his gaze, isn't as kind to her hungry guilt, looking for any sight of her wrongdoing to feed on. It's haggard. Tired. There's shadows under his eyes and stubble on his chin. He swallows, once, and she sees his mouth twitch as though he's choking down every hurt she's done to him.

And he's staring at her stomach. Emily is small, and the life inside her isn't any different, and she knows even this far along she can still almost pass for normal.

But he knows. She sees it hit him now, some seven and some months along, sees his eyes widen and those hands move ever so slightly towards her.

"Are you okay?" he asks, just like every single one of his messages has. It's not like it was before. There's nothing wild or fun about this.

It's still risky though, but it's not the kind of risk Emily relishes at all.

"Yes," she lies, and invites him in because being alone burns her.

They're awkward and tentative, even when they give up on small-talk and respond to the wordless kind of loneliness that's almost visible on their skin. He's naked on her bed, odd and gawky against the pale robin-egg blue sheets, the first time he's ever been in her room that's still more girl than woman, and his eyes are locked on her. She can't look at him without seeing his youth, his inexperience, the broadness to his shoulders that are filling out but not quite done yet, the line of muscle in his lanky legs.

She's frozen. She hugs her arms in front of her chest, her shirt the only clothing remaining, and how can she show him what she's become? What she let him make of her?

When he finally moves, stands, uses those careful, careful hands to tug her arms away, her shirt over her head, traces those rough fingers over her stomach in a way she's never seen him touch his gun… she's floored.

Lips against her forehead, he's shaking and broken, just like her. Two broken lives.

His palm splays against her stomach, his other arm around her back. She leans into that hug. Feels the life between them shift, confused by everything they're not saying. Everything that it's far too late to say.

Three broken lives.

"Beautiful," he whispers into her hair and, bizarrely, that's what makes her cry. She doesn't look at him, because she's worried he might be too, and there's no ring on his finger anymore.

Eventually he leaves, because he has to, and she's alone again. It's three days before March. It's eight hours before she wakes from a restless sleep, her sheets still thick with the smell of them, to find that her blue sheets aren't blue anymore, but red and accusing and eternally horrifying.

It's six days before the small life within her becomes a small, tentative life without.

And it's still too early.

 **.**

 **March**

They call him at work on the third, and he's not there to answer it. Rossi is.

"Hotchner," he barks, and there's an odd gleam to his eyes when he looks down at him. "I've got someone on the phone here insistent you've got a kiddo on the way." He grins, his expression triumphant, Hotch is floored, and it takes them both far too long to realize neither is on the same page.

Because Hotch is frozen, staring, and counting, and nothing is adding up. Rossi's smile slips. Hotch sees Gideon stand, walking towards them.

"But she's not due until mid-February," Hotch stammers, blinking, and he's never seen a man go pale faster than Rossi does, almost as though he's lived through this before.

"Okay," Rossi says calmly, and taps him on the arm. "Alright, Aaron. Let's go get you on a plane. It's going to be fine."

Later Hotch will thank him because he managed to stay calm when Hotch wasn't. Later, Hotch will think that it's odd that Rossi quietly offered to come with him, and he'll realize that part of Hotch knew that there was a _just in case_ in the man's eyes that Hotch wasn't willing to see, despite not being fully committed to the fact that this was happening quite yet. Later, Hotch will think it's strange that he accepted that offer from a man he barely knew—yet—but it's not that surprising, really, because Hotch has never worked well alone.

It all takes a hazy kind of nothingness after that. The flight is an instant, Rossi's hand on the small of his back is a fixed point of something real, the hospital is busy and silent all at once. Hotch says nothing.

 _Aaron Hotchner?_ a nurse murmurs, maybe, and Hotch is sure he answered. _Complications with Mom. She's in surgery. Intensive care. Do you want to see do you want to hold her do you—_

"Aaron." Rossi is there. Hotch blinks and nods, agreeing blindly to whatever they've offered him. Follows the nurse down endless corridors, their shoes squeaking on the tiles, noses sharp with the scent of bleach.

There's a pert _wait outside please, Sir,_ to Rossi outside the wide-glass window of the NICU, and then Hotch is being shown in, shown how to wash, soothed by a nurse who takes his rattled expression and the sick, giddy disorientation that he's sure shows on his features and handles him as smoothly as she does frantic parents every day.

 _Parents,_ Hotch thinks suddenly, and really wants to sit down. The room they're in is silent.

It's silent, despite the fact they're not alone.

There's three infants, all tiny, all still, and none making a sound. Hotch looks from one to the other, the nurse's words a buzz, and realizes suddenly he doesn't know his child's name— _holy shit his child_ —doesn't know the sex, doesn't know the colour of hair or the shape of face or—

"Here she is," the nurse says firmly, and takes his hand to rest it against a plexi-glass surface, cool and slick. The baby within is quiet, oddly coloured, oddly proportioned, and unlike its two roommates, breathing on its own.

Pink. Pink sheets.

She.

"Is she okay?" Hotch whispers, because this feels like the kind of place you whisper so you don't startle the nightmares hiding in the white-cream corners of the room, and the baby takes a sudden deep breath and scrunches her nose. Her hair is fine, barely there, but what he can see promises to be dark.

The nurse smiles. "She will be," she promises, and Hotch clings to that. He doesn't feel much other than shocked at this moment, and he's not sure he has it in his to ever feel like a dad, not with the way his own dad was, but… he clings to that. "Would you like to hold her? She can be held. It's good for her, especially since Mom can't right now."

He was wrong.

They sit him down and they put her in his arms, and she's tiny, barely spilling over the sides of his palms if he was to cup them together and lay her within. Tiny and light and impossibly fragile.

He was wrong.

She's impossibly alive.

And he loves her instantly.

"Atta'boy, Hotshot," Rossi says after, and his eyes are oddly bright.

 **.**

 **April**

One of the things Emily never quite forgives herself for is missing the first few weeks of her daughter's life.

Physically, she was there. The nurses assured her she was even conscious most of the time.

 _But_ , Emily wonders quietly, later on when the panic is over and she's laying with her daughter in her arms, _does it really count if I don't remember it?_

She remembers bits and pieces. She remembers the pain. She remembers waking up and tracing her fingers over the neat staples in her abdomen, counting them endlessly before realizing what they meant. She remembers begging for her mom, her dad, Aaron, Matthew. Mostly Matthew.

She remembers waking with a nurse soothing her and an impossibly little weight in her arms.

She remembers her mom. Elizabeth fussing, scolding the nurses, always within arm's reach. She remembers, oddly, Elizabeth telling her firmly that it all gets easier and wondering what encouraged her to say that. Maybe Emily did. She's not hugely sure.

On the bright side, she got the good painkillers, and that's gotta be one bonus of being an ambassador's daughter.

There's one more thing she remembers. Waking, one time towards the end, and finding Aaron with his chair against the bed, holding their child, talking to them both. She doesn't remember what he was saying.

But she remembers his expression, looking down at the bundle in his lap, and it's nothing she can describe with words. It makes her feel small and unimportant. Unneeded in that closed circuit of love between a father and daughter, somewhere she's never really known.

"You've got a good one there, gal," a nurse tells her when she's awake and frustrated with the room she's trapped in, the rigidity of the schedule she's under, the fuss of Aaron and her mother and the _insistence_ on pushing her daughter on her even though she can't, she _can't_ , hasn't she already proven that by fucking _sleeping_ for a good chunk of her daughter's first month?

They haven't even named her yet.

"Never left your side," the nurse adds, bustling out and leaving Emily with the quiet bassinet, the beeping monitors on them both, the whistle of a late-autumn bird outside.

"Shouldn't you be at work?" she asks him when he comes back from showering, shaving, whatever he does to make it look like he isn't spending every waking hour at the hospital. She thinks, dully, how odd it is that they've now spent the most time they've ever spent together, and she was stoned for most of it. "Or… somewhere. Not here."

He blinks and looks at her, then smiles. It's not a smile she recognises. It's soft and gentle and a little relieved, and he's looking at her like at some point over the past month, he's come to know her. It's… unsettling.

She craves that smile instantly.

"You're back?" he asks gently, and forgets himself for a moment. He reaches out and touches her palm, rough fingers careful on her skin. "We've missed you."

We. He's speaking for their unnamed daughter as well as himself. She should be furious that he has this connection she doesn't yet, this love she hasn't felt for the little silent stranger in the pink outfit and bunny-patterned blanket, but instead she just feels tired and sore all over.

And weak.

She squeezes his hand in return. "I'm here," she affirms, closing her eyes just to prove herself a liar, and he doesn't let go.

They name their daughter Marceline. Marceline Grace Prentiss, and he doesn't argue the surname despite her almost wanting him to.

And Emily thinks, watching Aaron hold her, that maybe… just maybe… this life she's created has a chance.

 **.**

 **May**

He's off his game, right when he needs to be at his best.

He can't find it. That self-assured Hotch, the calm confidence he'd wielded. In the field, he's hesitant. He looks to Rossi just a moment too long, falters just a few too many times. Rossi begins to frown, begins to watch him carefully. Gideon is disgruntled with the new 'Hotshot'. He can feel their scorn, their gazes on him, the whispers of SWAT and the other agents.

 _Has no place in the field,_ he imagines them saying, and hunches his shoulders over his desk in the bullpen, alone in a sea of strangers. _Why'd Rossi bring him in? He's too green. Too risky. Too liable to fuck it all up._

In front of him, his nameplate glints accusingly. _Probationary Special Agent Aaron Hotchner._

He leaves three more messages on Haley's answering machine. Two to tell her work is going well. One to tell her it's not. He regrets the last one, and how his voice is thick with alcohol and regret.

He leaves one on Emily's.

 _How are you?_

But he doesn't press when she doesn't reply, because she's resilient and independent, just like Haley, and he knows she doesn't need him.

 **.**

 **June**

She ignores him until she can't anymore, because she'd seen in his eyes the ruin of a man that night she'd first gone to him. Seen the hate aimed at her from his girlfriend— _fiancée_ , there was a ring—and she can't face that hate again. Until this moment, Emily had believed she was unflappable, uncaring, untouched by anything anyone threw her way.

Now, she knows she isn't. The woman's hate, because Emily doesn't know her name and doesn't ever want to know it, this woman she hurt with her selfishness, burns her like nothing else ever has.

Emily thinks it might be because she knows she deserves so much more than just hate. It's too late to repent, too late to fix anything, so she hides and she hides and she refuses to be herself anymore, because being meek is so much easier.

He comes to her finally, a wreak of a man, and sits in her doorway when she refuses to answer it. Marcie is silent, lethargic in her crib again, and Emily can't think for the knowledge of who's waiting outside her door.

So she opens it. Stares down at him. He's cross-legged and patient, waiting for her to acknowledge his presence.

"What do you want?" she snaps, and within her apartment, Marcie cries out once.

"A chance," he replies simply.

She lets him in.

 **.**

 **July**

He has to go back to work eventually, but it's different.

It's… better.

He's focused. His confidence is back. He doesn't falter in the field; he doesn't miss a beat with his profiles. He impresses Gideon.

He even manages to impress Rossi, just once. There's a choice. He could risk himself to save or a life, or be careful. Maybe still save the life, but more importantly, he'd save himself.

Rossi sounds tense over the earpiece as he orders Hotch to stand down, not to put himself in the firing line, and Hotch can tell he isn't expecting him to listen. _Reactionary, reckless, arrogant,_ whispers his personnel file.

But things are different now.

He steps back and instead of saving the day on his own, Hotshot Hotchner to the rescue, he waits for the rest of his team to have his back. He survives.

He has to now.

He finds a mug on his desk that night, chipped and battered from previous hands. '#1 Dad' used to be written on it, but someone—and Hotch knows who—has gone over 'Dad' and replaced it with 'Hotshot' in black marker.

Rossi hides his grin behind his hand, and Hotch drinks from that mug from every day on.

 **.**

 **August**

Marcie finds her voice, and she finds it well, and Emily suddenly very much understands why sometimes Mommys get sad and send their children back to Jesus.

Thank god for Elizabeth Prentiss.

"She's sick," Elizabeth says firmly one day, pressing a hand to Marcie's flushed face. "Just a cold, but call the doctor. You know what they said about her lungs."

A week later.

"Just feed her and let her sleep it off, Em. You can't react to every shriek or you'll go mad."

Emily is pretty sure she's already mad and not entirely sure she's Emily anymore. Emily was never this tired, this stressed, this alone.

Aaron calls every second day, whether he's on a case or not, and Emily can hear the same misery in his tone over the phone, but his is more from a wish to be here rather than a wish to be anywhere but. And when he hangs up, or she does, every time she has to bite back the whisper of _please come help me_ that she's desperate to voice.

He has his own life though, his work, and she's ruined him enough.

So she does it alone. Alone with her mom on speed-dial; alone with a sickly baby who scares her shitless five times a night by holding her breath for a heartbeat too long. Emily gives up on the security of a mobile and instead moves the bassinet close to her bed, sleeping with her ear to the side and snapping awake every half hour to check that Marcie's chest still moves, even reluctantly.

It does get better.

But it gets worse first.

 **.**

 **September**

"Can you come?" Emily asks him over the phone, and she sounds so fucking scared that he's on a plane before the hour is up.

"It's not uncommon with infants born as small as Marceline was," the doctor tells them, like it helps at all. 'Not uncommon' as far as Hotch is concerned should mean 'happens to anyone else but us', but here they are, and he misses, suddenly, Haley. She was always so much better at dealing with the worst.

Emily fiddles with the sleeve on Marcie's jumpsuit, the lining of silk, and Hotch looks everywhere but at her face, because she looks wrecked and he should have been here for her. "Is it permanent?" she asks, loudly, too loudly, and Marcie doesn't seem to notice.

A hesitation. "It is likely," the doctor says finally, and Hotch nods because one of them has to acknowledge him. "It does only appear to be a very mild impairment. It could stabilize and stay mild, or it could worsen, but it's not likely to improve on its own, I'm sorry."

He feels very, very old as they walk from the hospital together, their daughter in his arms. Another couple walks past and Hotch eyes their son, his chubby arms, his smile. So much bigger. Just as alive. The dad laughs, a bark of a sound, and his son looks at him and grins. Marcie is quiet.

"Move to Quantico," he says suddenly, and Emily shudders. "You can transfer to one of the colleges in DC, go back to studying, we can work something out with Marcie…" Because he's selfish and wants his daughter close, because he's honest and knows the thing Haley never forgave him for was putting her life on hold for his. Because he's a stupidly in love with the baby he's holding and dangerously close to being something like it for the brave, exhausted woman by his side, and he can't help them when he's hours away and she's reluctant to seem weak.

Emily stares at the boy in his stroller. "Okay," she says finally, and looks at Marcie. She repeats herself, quieter, and Marcie yawns. "Okay."

 **.**

 **October**

She reads a lot that month. Reads to catch up on her coursework, reads to understand the startlingly human things her tiny, helpless daughter keeps doing. Sometimes, Emily notes, she's very suddenly reminded that Marcie is a _person_ , with her own little thoughts ticking away in that tiny head and blankly cheeky expression.

Not everything she reads is positive.

Aaron visits on the weekends, and some nights when he's not away on a case. She shows him the book she's found and he's quiet.

"You didn't know," he says finally, lowering it. "You didn't even know you were pregnant."

Emily just tucks her knees to her chest, her back against the ratty couch she got on sale at a charity shop that her mother will _despise_ , and blinks away the words that are seared across her retinas.

 _…_ _Exposure to certain toxins may increase the likelihood of partial or complete hearing loss in infants, especially those born under a certain weight…_

Notably. Alcohol. Cigarettes.

"I should have known," she snaps, unfairly, because she'd never hold anyone else to those standards, but she's allowed to be cruel when it's her who's fucked up.

Aaron hums. He leans over, brushing his fingers against her leg. They don't touch, not often. They haven't slept together again, not since before Marcie was born. Emily was sick, and then Marcie was sick, and then there was everything else…

And they're not really together. Not really.

She hasn't seen him a suit for a while. Today, he's dressed casually. Jeans and a polo top. There's a stain on the collar from where Marcie coughed up on him, and he'd only scrubbed at it half-heartedly before getting distracted by their daughter again. She hasn't seen him in his careful, perfunctory suits, with his blankly-professional face, and it sends a warm jolt of _something_ she hasn't felt in a while deep into her belly to realize this.

 _I know you now,_ she almost whispers, just to see him look at her with surprise, maybe smile, maybe laugh. _I know you under those suits, Aaron Hotchner._

It's a giddy feeling.

 **.**

 **November**

Rossi invites him to Thanksgiving Dinner. "Bring Haley," he says cheerfully, and Hotch jolts and stares at him. Gideon, as always, looks oblivious.

"Haley left me," he says, dumbly, and Rossi is confused. "Last year."

Now they both look confused.

 _Uh oh,_ Hotch thinks as Rossi's eyebrows shoot up. "Of course," he says, eyeing Hotch oddly. "Err… did Marceline take your name, I can't for the life of me remember."

"Clumsy attempt at fishing, Dave," Gideon says, tuning into the conversation suddenly and lowering his book. "Haley's not the mother." He eyes Hotch like a hawk does a mouse, and Hotch tries not to sink guiltily into his chair or bite at his cheek like a kid caught drawing on the walls. "And I really don't think you're going to want to ask the question I can see you planning on asking."

Rossi doesn't ask. But he does invite 'Mommy Hotshot' along to dinner.

Oddly, Emily accepts. For the first time in months, Hotch sees a spark of what could almost be the Emily of old in her eyes. "Well," she says, from her kitchen bench where she's making herself a sandwich. "This is going to be _fun_." There's a wicked kind of glee in her voice. Hotch watches her carefully as she turns and smiles at him, licking the peanut butter from the blade of the knife carelessly, recklessly.

It is fun. Rossi, for the first time, is stunned into silence by the appearance of Ambassador Prentiss's daughter on his doorstep.

"And she gave you such a damn good recommendation too, you dog," he scolds after, shaking his head in disbelief, as Emily lays Marcie on his living room floor and solemnly explains that the leather bound books on the walls are 'pretentious and unloved'.

"I don't think the Ambassador was… entirely aware," Hotch admits, right as Emily lowers her voice and, he assumes, begins informing their daughter that both he and Rossi are also 'pretentious and unloved and only good for looking at'.

Rossi snorts. "If you believe she didn't know," he says, draining his glass and stepping back into the house to defend his bookshelf from Emily's cutting tongue, "Then you're more of an idiot than I'm now convinced you are."

His wife isn't there, and Hotch doesn't ask, because he's pretty sure Rossi wouldn't answer anyway.

 **.**

 **December**

It snows early that year. Emily is running through the cold, Marcie to her chest, when she hears the smallest, muffled whine from nearby.

Emily's always been far too curious for her own good.

"What," Aaron says flatly, when he comes over that weekend with his cheeks red from the cold and dark hair frosted with already melting flakes of snow, "Is that?"

Emily is cross-legged on the floor with Marcie and their newest family member both in front of her, two pairs of eyes locked on the ball of foil she's rattling about. Marcie mewls because she wants it, her new buddy mewls because _he_ wants it more, and a soft paddy-paw smacks decisively against her leg.

"This is Sergio," Emily says cheerfully, beaming at the kitten, and he promptly falls over his own too-long legs. "Isn't he cute?"

"Debateable," Aaron grumbles, but later that night Emily catches him threading his fingers through the kitten's coal-black fur just to make him purr, and she knows he likes him.

Eight o'clock comes and Marcie is asleep. Emily has a glass of wine and the heater is on, the room soft and warm and hazy. The carpet is threadbare, the couch ratty, and her dressing gown is obnoxiously orange with a tacky purple hem. She hates it and loves it equally because it's the most revolting thing she owns. Aaron stands to leave.

"Stay," she says suddenly, and tilts her head back to look up at him. She's on the floor, legs spread out in front of her, and he looks down on her, his eyes darkly shadowed from the angle. "Please?"

He hesitates. She waits.

Eventually, he lowers himself onto the floor next to her with a grunt, keeping a careful space between them. Passing him her wine glass, she tops it up. They share it, just as silently, as snow muffles the street outside and the night closes in. It takes a heartbeat to close the gap between them, to press their sides together, and the wine bottle is empty.

He opens another. Their legs tangle, and she fancies he looks relieved when she loses the dressing gown, although he lingers with a smile over the buttons of her flannel pyjamas and the rubber-duck prints liberally scattered across the front.

It's a week before Christmas, and he kisses her like it's the first time as their daughter sleeps up the hall. He tastes like wine, like mint, like being reckless and twenty-two and still alive, even though there were points over the past year she thought she must have died and just not realized.

It's the beginning of something.

For all of them.


	3. 1997

**Chapter Three: 1997**

 **.**

 **.**

 **January**

In January, Hotch begins to get the distinct feeling that he's in over his head. It's subtle at first. Small hints that something has changed.

Subtle as walking down the street, following five paces behind Rossi, and a woman walks past wearing a distinctive musky perfume. He smiles without reason to, and his head turns to watch her pass without him consciously being aware of deciding to do so.

As subtle as automatically turning right instead of left when driving home from a case and walking up the dingy stairs of her apartment, avoiding the creaky fifth one, listening out intently for the hollering voice of his daughter protesting all the inadequacies of the world.

It's as subtle as realizing he hasn't been home in two days. Waking up in the bed next to her, rolling over and brushing his lips against her sleeping face, and realizing with a short, sharp jolt that he's inexorably in love. This woman lying next to him, without any care for his wishes, had somehow crept into his heart and he suspects she's been there a while.

"Fuck," he says out loud, freezing.

"Just don't wake me up," she mumbles in reply, and he laughs because otherwise he'd have to cry.

It's probably, all things considered, not the worst thing that could have happened to him.

 **.**

 **February**

Marcie doesn't grow quickly, and Emily can't help but eye every other baby she sees when she takes her out and compare her small daughter to all of them. Marcie seems to watch them too, dark eyes wide and curious. When they squall and shriek, she's quiet. When they're alone, she babbles away, but when there are others around, she's silent. Emily can't help but wonder where the hell the 'shy' gene crept in because it sure as hell wasn't hers or Aaron's.

She takes her to the hairdressers one day when she realizes she's lost weeks to college study for her final year and the daily grind of looking after an infant, and treating herself is a change. They're all quietly pretending that there isn't a considerable allowance being placed in her bank account from an _E. Prentiss_ every month, and she'd feel guilty about that except Elizabeth is a doting, if distant, grandmother. She's seen her granddaughter a handful of times, and Emily doubts this will change if her childhood is anything to go by.

Maybe the money is repentance for that.

"You're a cutie," the hairdresser croons to Marcie in her stroller, who ignores her in favour of her much more interesting toes. She doesn't look up at the sound of her voice despite Emily being almost sure that she _can_ hear it, and Emily tries not to worry about that. "What were you thinking, love?" the hairdresser continues, switching her attention to Emily. As soon as she looks away from Marcie, Marcie's eyes are tracking her carefully. Cautiously.

Emily stares at her daughter.

"A change," she says finally.

 **.**

 **March**

Marcie turns one and Hotch can't help but watch Emily and Rossi trying to coax her into blowing out her single, wavering candle and wonder where the fuck the last year went.

Sergio jumps into the cake when their backs are turned, Marcie cries because there's too much excitement, and overall it's an exhausting, exhilarating day.

Rossi knocks a chair and it clatters to the ground.

Marcie bawls because the noise startled her.

And Hotch has never been happier to see her scared. "She heard it," he says to Emily after, as she's wrestling a growling, spitting, towel-wrapped Sergio into the sink to try and get the ice-cream cake out from between his toes. "She reacted!"

"She does," Emily replies, accidentally dunking Sergio's head and getting a shriek in response. Marcie giggles from her high chair, unaware she's up for the next bath, and Hotch wonders if he should volunteer to do it for Em since she's probably going to be spending the next hour trying to convince Sergio that the humans in his life still love him, despite this betrayal of his trust. "Sometimes. The doctors are optimistic. It's manageable, Aaron."

But that night as he tucks her into her bed, unwrapping her sleepy arms from around her neck, he still makes sure to press his mouth close to her ear to whisper _I love you_. Just to be sure that she hears.

 _"Da,"_ she agrees sleepily, and he considers asking Emily to move in.

 **.**

 **April**

They never really make it official. It just happens.

He gets knocked on his stupid head one day at work, by a suspect who got the better of him, and she's furious and frightened and obsessed with the neat line of stitches almost hidden by his hairline. She fusses. Not by being kind or gentle or anything that maybe his ex-fiancée would have done, but by snapping and sniping and viciously striking any weak points he bares, because she knows now he can be lost, can be taken, and she'd rather chase him away before that happens.

"You know," he says, and he's scowling and Marcie is crying and everything is fucked. "Anyone would think you're in love with me, the way you're acting."

"So what if I am?" she snaps, folding her arms, and then she bursts into tears. He hugs her. Wraps those arms that aren't as tentative as they were when she met him around her shoulders, tugs her into a chest that's broader, firmer, and holds her close. His hands haven't changed and they curl around her bicep, fingers tracing her arm, and she can't bear this.

"I love you too," is all he says. When he kisses her, she can taste her tears on his lips from where his mouth brushed her cheek, and she can feel the possibility of loss in the heat radiating from the raw bruising on his temple. "I'll be more careful. There won't be a next time."

He's wrong. There's plenty of next times.

To get him back for that, she begins to leave application forms around her apartment, right where he'll see them. She's graduating soon, she'll be twenty-three in October. It's time to begin looking beyond this quiet little flat, this quiet little life, this odd family of four they've built out of nothing.

 _Application for Special Agent: Language Analyst enclosed._

He pales when he sees them, but he doesn't dissuade her. She's rather smug about that.

 **.**

 **May**

His father dies of lung cancer, and Hotch spends the day of his funeral at the park with Emily and Marcie. It's sappy, stupid, and just what he needs to remember that he isn't the sum of his upbringing.

"What was he like?" Emily asks once, when they've eaten the take-away they brought for the occasion, because Emily's new homeliness doesn't extend to packed lunches, and the silence is settling on their shoulders. Marcie is asleep in Hotch's lap, one hand curled around her feet in an odd monkey-ball of baby and yellow cotton, and he traces his fingers over the chubby line of her arm as he answers.

"Cruel," he says finally, and tries to imagine being like that.

Marcie sniffs in her sleep, restless, and the thought of that cruelty makes him feel ill and angry all at once. _No one will hurt you_ , he promises her, silently so Emily doesn't laugh at his 'chauvinistic' attitude, but he means it. When he glances at Emily, out of the corner of his eye, she's reclined on one arm, staring absentmindedly at the playground, and the sun only serves to illustrate the long, pale curve of her throat. Her hair is short. Cropped close to her head, and at first he hadn't liked it. It was nothing like Haley had ever had.

It had only taken him an hour to realize she was nothing like Haley, and to realize that maybe he liked it after all.

Now, he loves it. Loves the cocky air it gives her expression. Loves the way she can't hide her features behind it. Loves how young and alive it makes her seem. How young and alive she is.

"Mine was distant," Emily says suddenly, and he follows her gaze and she's watching a girl alone on the swings, kicking her feet sadly at the bark chips below. "But we're not our parents, Aaron."

 _No one will hurt you either,_ he thinks, watching her, but that's not true because she's already been hurt before.

"No, we're not," he agrees, and takes her hand.

 **.**

 **June**

She goes to Aaron's apartment one day while Marcie is at day care, obtrusively to water the plants that he'd for some reason recently acquired—she suspects Rossi's influence, but can't narrow down _why_ —but more openly because she's curious and very nosey, really.

It's not what she'd expected. It's clean. Spotless, in fact, barely lived in, and now she kind of understands the plants, because there's nothing here that shows that the man who exists within these walls has anything that he's responsible for besides those already partially wilted ferns.

At least, not until she sneaks into his bedroom; past the living room with the couch that's never seen the inside of a charity store, the neat hallway hung with art she's sure he doesn't actually care about, and the lamps she knows he didn't pick out. The whole place, as she tiptoes through to hide the fact she's out of her element, feels like someone else's home, not his.

There's no book open on the side of the armchair, abandoned in favour of laying on his back on the rug with Marcie sitting on his stomach and giggling as he holds his breath to make her bounce. There's no shoes kicked against the doorway, laces tangling with her own. There's no battered _#1 Hotshot_ mug upside-down airing on the sink. There are real estate magazines neatly lined up on the unused kitchen table. He's thinking of buying a home, and that's an odd, permanent kind of thought.

But what there is, she finds, as she steps into a room that smells clean and aired and only faintly of the cologne Elizabeth had brought him last Christmas, is Marcie.

Pictures on the dresser, an untidy jumble of them all trying to be in the forefront, like he couldn't decide which one he wanted to see upon waking. They're her and they're Marcie and only one has him in it and it's tucked to that back, and for some reason that hurts and she can't verbalize why. There's a stuffed rabbit missing an eye that Emily had banned after Marcie had attempted to eat the other eye propped on his bedside cupboard, smiling vacantly back at her. There's, bizarrely, parenting books stacked precariously in the jumble of paperbacks and regulation manuals along his bookshelf.

In here is his home, and oddly, it almost feels like hers too.

 **.**

 **July**

It's Elizabeth who suggests it.

They're eating an awkward dinner at the Prentiss home, and he's trying to avoid the raised eyebrows of the cook when she bustles out with another dish. He knows her, got to know her well when she'd slip him a coffee or a spiced tart while he was working his shifts, and he can't work out if she's amused or disapproving by him now that he's sitting at the table with the results of that six-month posting attempting to draw pictures in her custard next to him.

Emily vanishes after dessert to, hopefully, remove at least some of the custard from Marcie's nose and hair, leaving Hotch alone with the elder Prentiss and the distinct feeling he's waiting outside the principal's office once more. He has to fight the urge to look down at his feet.

"Thank you," Elizabeth says suddenly, quietly, and he looks up at her sharply and finds her studying him over the rim of her wine glass.

"For what?"

Elizabeth smiles and for a moment, just a moment, he can see Emily in that expression and the slightest hint of Marcie. Suddenly, he's painfully aware that this woman is Emily's Mom, that she loves Emily just like they love Marcie, and that he's a part of that now. "For their happiness," she responds, and looks thoughtful while he's speechless. "You know, I'm home for the foreseeable future. I would like a chance to spoil my granddaughter. Give you two a chance to… oh, I don't know. Be young. Romantic. God knows, I never had the opportunity."

Emily handles leaving Marcie at her mother's for the night a lot easier than Hotch does, he's startled to find, especially considering she doesn't even _live_ with him.

"She knows to make sure Marcie is looking at her when she talks to her?" he frets in the car, eyes skittering to his mobile in the console between them.

"Yes, Aaron," Emily says patiently.

While she's showering ready for their date—and _that's_ an odd thought, because they've been doing whatever it is they're doing for god knows how long now, and they've never actually 'dated'—he paces outside the door. Eventually, he sidles in, narrowing his eyes as the steam and the fog of Emily's ridiculously hot shower settles over him. "You _did_ leave her Marcie's blanket?" he double-checks, and Emily throws the shampoo bottle at him. It leaves a streaky-soapy mark down his arm, so she manages to talk him into joining her in the shower since _'well, you can't go out like that, really, Aaron.'_

They're late for their dinner reservation because five minutes in the shower had turned into ten minutes fighting to stay under the stream and then another ten minutes in the bedroom in each other as they gave into the inevitable.

Which then meant another shower, separately this time, because never let it be said they can't learn from their mistakes.

"Do you think Marcie is worried we're not there?" he asks, halfway through their delicious dinner, and Emily leans forward and he promptly stops wondering because her dress is black and cut low and entirely inappropriate if the intention of the night is him keeping his hands to himself.

Fortunately, that's not the intention of the night, and they're drunk and giddy as they stumble up the stairs to his apartment and her dress is just as gorgeous pooled on his living room floor. After, they're naked still, he's making coffee, and he turns to find her seated at the kitchen table with her legs crossed and ankles neatly entwined, paging through one of his glossy real estate magazines he'd ordered but never committed to.

It's a small moment. One of many. He thinks of Marcie and he thinks of the wine and he thinks of how she still startles him, even now, probably forever.

"I'm buying a house," he says, unnecessarily, and Emily hums and licks her finger to turn the page. "A house, Em."

She pauses. It's a small pause. He glories in these small moments.

He makes it a big one. "With a yard," he says, putting the coffee down next to the magazine and his hands on her shoulders, leaning over until his breath is warm and careless against her throat, the choppy cut of her silky-dark hair. "And a nursery. Maybe a tree with a swing." _Three bedrooms,_ he doesn't say, because he's always cocky, always ahead of himself, and Marcie is growing so fast and so alone, he can't bear it.

"I never had a swing," Emily says, softly, and he closes his eyes.

A small question. "Do you want one?"

 **.**

 **August**

August brings a case that takes Aaron away for almost three weeks. He's tense on the phone the first week, harried the second, and dodges her calls the third. She's patient. Never needy. She worries, but she gives him his space.

They settle on the house Aaron had his heart on. Emily feels like an outsider while he's gone, floating around in this nice-house that she hasn't as of yet contributed to. The space is still too empty, with Aaron's furniture from his flat not enough to fill two floors, and her stuff terribly out of place.

Sergio spends hours racing up and down the stairs just because he can, and Marcie watches him from her playpen with an expression that has Emily already mentally measuring up baby-gates in her mind.

"We'll paint Marcie's nursery when I get back," he'd promised, before he'd gone on what she's now privately calling _The Case_ , because everyone knows that every law enforcement officer one day meets their _Case_ , the one that haunts them, and she worries this might be his.

And she's right, but also wrong. She should have learned by now not to ever assume with him.

He comes home tired and edgy and goes straight to Marcie's room. It's late, getting later, and she finds him sitting in the armchair watching their daughter sleep, and he hasn't even taken his gun off.

"Bad case?" she says, and he shudders and looks at her with ghost-eyes, shadowed eyes, and she wonders what those eyes have seen.

"They're all bad," he says, and she stops herself from replying _but some are worse than others_ and wonders instead if his gentle hands and soft eyes had been looking on someone else's daughter, maybe just as small as Marcie, just as helpless, but not as safe. Maybe sprawled and betrayed on a glossy photograph tacked to some corkboard in a local PD. Maybe splashed across the 6 o'clock news.

But he doesn't let it haunt him, this case, the one she later finds out had no resolution, no ending, just the whisper of a man the news called _The Reaper_ , and she guesses that's the end of it. He moves on and she does too.

 **.**

 **September**

Derek Morgan begins in September, and Hotch looks at him and thinks, privately, that if he makes it past the first six months, he'll be a damn good profiler. He's focused, if arrogant, and god knows, the rest of them have proven that that combination works more often than it doesn't.

It does, however, mean that their team of three becomes a team of four, and their personalities clash more often than not.

"I'm way too old for this," Rossi admits one day, after Morgan almost gets himself shot tackling an unsub, and Hotch just laughs and dismisses it out of hand. He's _Rossi_. The David Rossi.

He can't ever get old.

But, apparently he can.

His retirement party is loud, festive, and both Emily and Hotch attempt to drink Rossi under the table. They fail.

"Here's to his book!" Hotch announces, winking at Rossi. "Maybe he'll finally finish something he's started now he hasn't got us under his feet distracting him."

Rossi tilts his glass to their toast, the gold watch he'd been given by the collective Bureau tossed carelessly on the table in front of him and the typewriter Hotch and Gideon had sourced personally placed carefully where he can run his fingers over it when he thinks they aren't looking. "Hey, I trained you up, didn't I?" he protests. "Turned you from an arrogant sonofabitch to what you are now."

Hotch waits for the other shoe to drop, because Rossi is sparse with his praise, sparser with public acclaim, and he can tell by Gideon and Morgan's faces that they're both waiting as well. "And what am I now?" he finally prompts, and Gideon grins in a rare show of humour at the expected insult they're all tensed for.

Rossi drains his glass and sets it down with a clink, his expression strange. "A damn fine agent," he says finally, quietly, and the table falls silent. "And a good man."

Emily tangles her fingers around his under the table, and the silence is broken by, of all people, Gideon.

"I'll drink to that," he says, and does exactly that.

 **.**

 **October**

Emily turns twenty-three with very little acclaim.

Aaron hands her a box that morning, before the sun is up and bringing with it their increasingly inquisitive daughter. Hair still damp from his shower, his skin warm and scented with soap, he's a vivid presence in her bed and her life, and she lays there and feels silly for how lucky she is to have this.

"Oh, you shouldn't have," she teases, even though he absolutely should have thank you very much, and opens it. It's an application. Her application for the FBI. Under that, a single bullet. She blinks.

"You're coming to the firing range with me every morning," he says softly, leaning over. The box tilts, the bullet rolling against the cardboard, rattling. "Every bullet is a life, Emily. Every bullet. This one is from my gun."

She picks it out, the smooth surface cold on her fingertips with the promise of winter creeping into their home. "And whose life is this one?" she teases, holding it up between her fingers.

He leans forward, catches her hand, and presses his mouth to her fingertip, the tip of the bullet pressing ever so slightly into his lips. "Yours," he says, intently, and she can't breathe. "It's yours. Don't lose it."

He leaves her in the bedroom with her bullet and his love, and she curls on her side in the too-empty bed and wonders what it feels like to have her heart suddenly walking around in another human being, because that's what this gift implies, this tiny, minute present. It might be her life, but it's his heart, and she doesn't know what makes him think he can trust her with something so precious.

Before he leaves for work, he comes to say goodbye. In his arms, their sleepy, ruffled daughter, and he slips her into the covers against Emily's breast and leans down to kiss them both goodbye.

His lips taste, faintly, of the cold-metal bullet, and she almost begs him to stay.

She gets the bullet made into a necklace with a long chain and wears it around her neck. It hangs low, against her sternum, bumping against the wire of her bra if she leans over, but it's out of sight.

After all, she'd never wear her own heart on display, so she won't wear his openly either.

 **.**

 **November**

Time passes. The FBI academy gives Emily a new focus, a confidence she'd never been lacking but never quite worn without being reckless, and he watches with interest as it changes her from still-almost-a-girl into a woman.

She's still Emily though, still his, and Marcie ties them together.

He thinks, maybe, that this is what he was missing all those years ago when he broke the first mug.

 **.**

 **December**

Christmas comes, and he has a case.

She spends it at her mother's with Marcie and copious amounts of wine, and almost has… fun. She'll never admit it to her mother though. He rings at nine to say Merry Christmas, the only time the lines haven't been completely clogged, and Marcie is already asleep.

"Merry Christmas," he murmurs, and she can hear Morgan barking something in the background, Gideon excited, the sounds of movement. "I've got to go. Give her my love?"

"Of course," she says back, and closes her eyes to pretend he's here. "I love you."

But the line is dead and he's gone, saving lives, being Hotch. The BAU's Hotch, not her Aaron. They're very different people and she doesn't need to see how he carries himself in his suit to know that.

She may have fucked Hotch in the backseat of her car all those years ago, but it's Aaron she loves now with her hands and her body and her actions. It's a curious thought, and later that night she crawls into bed with Marcie asleep on the mattress next to her, dark hair beginning to curl at the ends and mouth turned up in an almost smile, she wonders if she'll become Prentiss when they hand her a badge. Prentiss, instead of Emily, and if that will change her.

She's not that scared of change anymore, though, so she doesn't dwell on it for long.


	4. 1998

**Chapter Four: 1998**

 **.**

 **.**

 **January**

Hotch spends his first Monday as Gideon's Senior Agent in the bullpen.

"You know they gave you an office, right?" Morgan says, handing him a coffee with a grin that says _I got you this on purpose_ when Hotch knows he probably only did it on muscle memory because neither of them are used to him being behind the wall yet. "It has a desk and everything. Fancy bookshelves. Nice carpeting. No Anderson."

"Hey!" protests Anderson, and they both ignore him.

"It still smells like Rossi," Hotch grumbles, scowling at what used to be _his_ desk and now contains a really sheepish looking Anderson. "I'm worried he has cameras in the walls."

"That's… a distinct possibility," Morgan says, and they both turn as one to stare suspiciously at the office door.

Eventually, he puts some books on the shelves. Diploma on the wall. They put his name on the door. A photo of Emily holding Marceline, both in light summer dresses and grinning past the camera.

He doesn't sit in the bullpen again.

 **.**

 **February**

"I don't do Valentine's Day," Emily had said, their first February together, and Aaron had apparently taken that as a challenge.

Last year he'd tied bows to both Marceline and Sergio, with what he assured Emily were lovely tickets to a play Rossi had recommended. Assured her, because Marcie had managed to partially consume hers, and they still have no idea where Sergio had hidden the other.

This year, he's behaving.

So far.

Until she drags herself home from work after a gruelling counterterrorism case, and finds the house empty. Suspiciously empty.

Empty except for a box on their bed. She approaches it carefully, one hand on her hip, considering using her gun to open the fucking thing because it's probably going to be sappy, it's certainly going to be romantic, and the whole thing is fucking ridicu—

It's a dress. It's black and glitters slightly as it pools between her fingers. When she holds it up, it's long, the material clingy, and completely demure in a way that she knows will have his eyes on her all night.

"Oh, Aaron," she whispers, because she goddamn loves it and she can't tell him that because she can't let him win this one, damnit.

There's a hand on her hip, a gentle pressure, and she didn't even hear him coming and he's the only one who can still sneak up on her, the only one she'll let. "I hope you like it," he rumbles into her ear, and just like that her breathing is fast and she's leaning back against him. Lips against the shell of her ear, his palms settling around her waist, and he knows exactly where to nip to make her melt.

"Jesus, Aaron," she says, eyes closed and body quivering, and he chuckles. "Do you want me in or out of the dress?"

"Both," he murmurs into her ear, pressing against her, and he's hard and she's ready.

They make it to the play, a year late and twenty minutes, but she's pretty sure he doesn't hear a word because he's gazing at her all the night with soft, confusing eyes, and she doesn't know what he's doing or how she feels about it, but she does know that she's flushed and awkward and completely in love with this man.

"Home?" she asks after, and he smiles, wrapping an arm around her waist. Tugging her against him.

"Not yet."

Dinner.

He's outdone himself. "This is revoltingly romantic," she scolds him, her mouth turned up in a stupid sappy smile that betrays her heart and her skin hot and on far too tight. "You disgust me."

There's music playing. His eyebrows raise, he takes on his 'Hotch' expression, and he tilts his head towards the open floor where couples are already dancing.

"No," she says, and folds her arms. "No hope, Aaron."

But, of course, she does.

It's slow, even, and he doesn't miss a step. He guides her easily through the throngs of others and she feels safe, feels treasured, feels like she's come home.

"I love you," she says into his chest, his heart against her cheek.

"I know," he says, tilting her mouth up to his. The kiss is long, leisurely, and almost obscene for such a public place. She's thankful for his arms around her. "I love you too."

She's also thankful for twenty-year-old Emily and her recklessness about this man.

Always thankful.

 **.**

 **March**

The wheel on Marcie's stroller gets jammed one day while he's walking her through the supermarket on an endless quest for 'you know, that nice detergent we had that time', and he really doesn't know and Marcie isn't much help.

He's crouched next to it, examining it solemnly, and Marcie helps him by giggling at the sight of her daddy on the ground by the canned soup, and then dumps her juice on his head.

"Thank you," he tells her tiredly, and she beams at him in return, cackling some more. Her mother's goddamn daughter after all. "I'm not letting you out of the house once you turn thirteen," he scolds, suddenly vividly picturing Emily at twenty and going cold imagining her even younger. He amends his statement as he tries to wrestle some kind of wipe out of the bag attached to the stupid stroller, almost tipping the whole thing over, "Actually, eight. House lockdown at eight."

There's juice in his eyes and his daughter just keeps snickering at him, like she's fully aware that right now and probably for the next ten years he's the absolute bee's knees, but as soon she hits puberty there's going to be no listening to dear old Dad.

Maybe it's not too late to give her to Rossi. Late retirement present. _Here you go, Dave. If she's like me, she'll be stupid. If she's like her mother, you'll wish she was stupid._

"Hello, Aaron," says a voice he's never quite forgotten from behind him, and he turns to find Haley with her eyes locked on Marcie and her bottom lip pinched from where she's chewing on it.

"Haley," he says dumbly, and Marcie throws her cup. "Oh shi-fuck!"

Retrieving the cup, he turns to find Haley with the queerest expression he's ever seen on her face and the packet of wet wipes he was struggling to find in her hands. She takes one out, hands it to him, and smiles shakily. Her eyes keep flickering to Marcie, who hides her face behind her hands and pretends she's not there.

"There's a lock," Haley says suddenly, her voice overloud, and kneels to show him how to unhook it. "It's hidden. My… I babysit, sometimes, they have one just like it. Hello, there. Who are you then? Oh gosh, you've got your daddy's hair…"

Her eyes are shiny-bright, her face is flushed, and he knows she's talking to hide how awkward this is. Wiping the sticky juice from his cheek and ear, he swallows twice and tries to find his voice.

"This is Marceline," he says finally, because it's always easy to talk about his child, always, and then before Haley can say anything, "You'll need to be in front of her if you want her to listen to you. She's… her hearing isn't…" Another swallow. For a moment, sickly, he feels almost embarrassed. Guilty of that embarrassment. Furious at himself for it.

"Oh." Haley shuffles around front and touches Marcie's hand, gently. Dark eyes peek out from behind spread fingers. "Hello, Marceline. It's nice to meet you. Do you wave?" She waves and something in Hotch's chest twinges, whispers _look what could have been, if you hadn't broken her heart. You don't even regret it, do you?_

Marcie shakes her head and then proves herself a liar by waving quickly before re-hiding her face.

Haley straightens. "Are you with, um… Emily?" she asks, and it's not really her place to ask, he wouldn't ask her a similar question, but he doesn't really begrudge her. Doesn't really begrudge her the small jibe at pretending to forget Emily's name either, even though he knows the name is very likely seared into her memory; he'd ensured that.

"Yes," he says, and tucks the sticky wipe into his pocket. "I am. I'm sorry, we really have to go. Marcie's going to get cranky soon, she doesn't focus well in loud places…"

"I understand," Haley says, but by the look on her face, she doesn't really. He doesn't blame her. "It was good seeing you, Aaron."

That's a lie.

He lets her have it. Returns it, even.

"Good seeing you too," he says, a lie, and walks out of her life again.

 **.**

 **April**

Her work doesn't take her up to the sixth floor very often, but it does bring a member of the BAU down to her.

"Um, hello?" says a soft, nervous voice one morning, and Emily looks up to find a blonde woman with her hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail designed to make her look severe peering down at her. Blue eyes and make-up to add years where other people would mask them, Emily's heart goes out to her. "I was looking for an Agent Prentiss?"

"You found her," Emily says, and smiles warmly. Over the next few hours assisting 'please, call me JJ', she discovers that under the newness the woman wears uncomfortably, there's a kind, quick-witted personality waiting to be given the chance to show itself.

Emily does what she does best, and drags her kicking and screaming out of her shell.

Three weeks later, she's gotten her out to a club, Morgan tagging along with their new tech they introduce as Penelope, and there's no sign of the terrified mouse anymore.

"She'd make a great agent," Morgan shouts over the music, watching Penelope dance around the laughing JJ. "After a bit of training. But heck, I don't know how we managed without her media contacts. Woman is a genius with the press."

Aaron, later that night, is quieter with his praise but Emily knows to read between the lines.

"She's good at her job," he comments quietly in his _I'm at work and professional_ tone that's slowly creeping into his personal life too, and she hugs his shoulders and thinks that, in Aaron-speak, that's a glowing recommendation.

 **.**

 **May**

Increasingly, it's Hotch beating Emily home and spending the night alternating between paperwork and heating mushed peas for Marcie and attempting to somehow convince her of their nutritional value, while not being completely sure of it himself.

The TV is muted, the better for him to talk to her without the distraction of the background noise, but she startles anyway at the rolling boom of an oncoming storm overhead, loud enough to rattle the windows.

She jumps and the peas flip into his lap. "Damn," he mutters, looking down and pulling a face. Another clap from outside. Maybe he should ring Emily and ask her to be care…

Marcie whimpers. He looks at her, and her eyes are wide and shocked, mouth opened.

"Are you scared of storms?" he asks, and tries to remember if this is a problem they've faced in the past. Marcie's lip quivers.

Another boom. This one is directly above them and brings with it enough rain to fill the Potomac.

Marcie screams with it and keeps on screaming.

Three hours later, Emily is on her way home and he's been pacing the hall with their _still_ screeching daughter red-faced and shaking since the storm first blew in. His phone beeps and he shuffles her to one arm to check the grainy green screen for the blocky text. ROAD BLOCKED. HOME LATE. JUST SING TO HER.

"Your daddy puts the fear of god into serial killers," he tells Marcie, and she hiccups and chokes on her sobs, face dry and eyes scrunched up. Still miserable. Still shaking. He knocks her arm away as she flings it up to scratch at her ears, rubbing her small palm between his fingers to try to distract her from the noise outside. "And now here I am. Singing. Come on, love. Look at my mouth."

She does, blinking. Her eyes are red, gritty, and he can tell she's exhausted, wired, terrified still. Tapping his mouth, he carefully and tunelessly forms the words. He can't sing. He's terrible. But… she quietens. " _And though I can't guarantee there's nothing scary hiding under your bed, I'm gonna stand guard…"_

That night, Emily gets home and finds them both curled up in the armchair, Hotch asleep with his head tilted back and Marcie asleep with her ear pressed to his chest and thumb in her mouth, lulled to sleep by the sound of his heart.

He's over-protective, hot-headed, and sometimes stupid, but she loves him sorely in that moment. Even if he can't always protect them from what they're scared of.

He might count this as a failure, but she's very aware it's nothing of the sort.

 **.**

 **June**

Emily gets held at gunpoint. It's not a quick held at gunpoint either. It's long enough that the news of it is filtered into the rest of the Bureau, which isn't long at all.

 _Agents Prentiss and Calpone are hostages. Proceed with caution. Their conditions are unknown._

She knows the terminology. Hostages. Caution. 'Condition'. All words that are really just, in this situation, synonyms for _alive_.

For now.

There's a gun at her head, her partner isn't moving, and all she can think about is never going home. Never seeing Marcie sing or paint or go to school or get in a fight or fall in and out of love.

And Aaron is so fucking insecure half the time, she probably should have told him at some point that he's an amazing dad, he'll be an amazing dad with or without her, and this is all frighteningly close to admitting that there's a bullet with her name on it and a man with his finger on the trigger.

But that's not right.

"You're going to die here, bitch," says the man, and that's not true at all.

The bullet that represents her life isn't in his gun. It's not at the mercy of his hairline trigger. It's not in the skill of the hostage negotiator they have who's probably very good, but not the best, because she knows Rossi is retired and they've probably got Hotch on lockdown to stop him from walking in here.

 _No I'm not,_ she thinks, because there's only one bullet with her name and her life etched onto it, and it's around her neck, warm from her skin and her continued existence, and she needs to survive to thank Aaron for ensuring that.

She does.

She takes the man down, his partner too, and there's a second where they very nearly get the upper hand, but then the room is filled with black and there's SWAT and FBI surrounding her. One of them is Morgan, and his face is grim. He's young, reckless, reactionary; she sees Hotch in him then, because he sees the bruise on her face and gives the man who did it a matching one.

"I can protect myself," she says to him after, and remembers a similar scene, a similar man, but a very different girl. Girl, not woman.

He grins, shakily, and leads her from there without letting her lean on him, despite wanting her to. _Chauvinist._ "I know," he says, and she almost laughs out loud. "But I wanted him alive, Prentiss."

And there's the difference. The men might be similar.

She's not. And she has a scar across her belly and a bullet around her neck to prove it.

She walks out of there on her own two feet, not because she's not shaky—she is, and concussed as fuck to boot—but because she knows that outside that warehouse there's a police line and a FBI command station and behind them both, she knows there's a man who needs to see her living.

His eyes are wild and his hands wilder. The bullet is warm in her hand, sticky with the blood from her fingers, and it's the first time she's taken it off since he gave it to her.

"Emily, god," he gasps, almost a moan, and drags her into his arms and she can feel him shaking, falling apart. "I couldn't… god."

She presses the bullet into his hand. He stares at it, tilts it, letting the light catch the metal and the blood and the coppery sheen.

"I didn't lose it," she says, and doesn't let go.

 **.**

 **July**

Nothing happens in July, and it's a relief.

Well, small things happen. Small things, inconsequential things.

Emily sets the oven on fire accidentally because she forgot there was a chicken roasting in there.

Hotch goes on two cases and solves both, but then they have a third they fail. People die, people he could have saved had he made a different call. He comes home drunk and sleeps on the couch and they both pretend he's fine, until he actually is and they can stop pretending. Until next time.

Marcie finally masters the block toy, and discovers a hitherto unknown love of babbling along with the radio when Emily turns it up high enough that she can pick out the audible vocals. Hotch thinks it's adorable, because he's hopeless when it comes to knowing his child's flaws, and Emily just privately notes that Marcie is probably going to be as good at singing as her parents are. Which is to say, not.

It's a small month, but that doesn't make it any less.

And time passes.

 **.**

 **August**

He misses a call from Sean in August. Sean, his brother, but not his family. Not for a long time.

He tells himself this, but still he calls him back. Because he's always, always, been responsible for cleaning up his brother's messes, and he can't bring himself to walk away now.

It's drugs. Drugs and money and endless broken promises, small promises cascading into big promises cascading into the knowledge that he can't bring this man into his daughter's life, into Emily's life, and so when he does help his brother, he does it with money transferred from his own account and a blocked phone number.

He also does it with cruelty, and a firm _don't contact me again until you've sorted yourself out, Sean._

Sean snaps and snarls and says, _you're not my father, Aaron, so don't pretend to be_ and his pupils are blown and his arms are covered.

Hotch isn't their father, he'll never be their father, and so he walks away.

For now.

 **.**

 **September**

Marcie talks late, but she _does_ talk.

Her first word, not surprisingly, is Dad.

Her second, more surprisingly and to Emily's eternal disgruntlement, is boo.

Unfortunately, that's the one that sticks.

"I blame you," she grumbles on the third morning she goes to wake their daughter up and is greeted by two wide, very-awake brown eyes and a shouted _boo!_ "She clearly inherited your incessant need to frighten people."

Aaron peers at her from over his coffee mug, and there's butter on his mouth from his toast. "I don't frighten people," he protests, flicking his tongue over that butter, and she could list a thousand reasons why _that's_ not true, but she doesn't. Everything from his suits to his glares are designed to intimidate those he wants intimidated, and she knows the new recruits murmur behind their hands about the _hard case Hotch._

It's a change from Hotshot, but not entirely unwelcome.

And if maybe she gets him to use his Hotch voice occasionally in the bedroom… well, she's only human, after all.

 **.**

 **October**

In October, Elizabeth is ill. It's a frightening few weeks of Emily trying not to look worried and Hotch trying not to scold her too much for the damage she's doing to her fingernails, and it's also a frightening few weeks of Hotch wondering just how much guilt his girlfriend is going to carry if this goes terribly, terribly wrong.

But it doesn't. Elizabeth gets better.

And, in a show of both maturity and being very aware of what was almost lost, Emily elects that perhaps they should spend Sundays having dinner with her mother.

The first one is awkward. Elizabeth is still pale, tires quickly, and Hotch is silent watching Emily fuss like she's the mother. Marcie falls asleep in her high chair and they end up staying the night.

The second is easier.

The third and Hotch is almost beginning to wonder if this is what family has supposed to be all along.

He's walking Marcie across the grass outside, it's barely sunset, and the air is brisk but not quite uncomfortable. Marcie is giggling, her fingers gripping his tightly, unsteady on her legs but delighting in the firm support of his arms as she throws herself into walking anyway.

He knows she's there before she speaks. But, she still manages to surprise him.

"Do you intend upon marrying my daughter, Aaron?" Elizabeth says suddenly, and reaches a hand down to take Marcie's spare arm. They hold her up together, steadied between them, and the sun dips lower. They'll have to take her inside soon.

Hotch thinks.

Then he realizes he doesn't really need to think at all.

"Yes," he says bluntly, and sees her smile on the profile of her face. "When she's ready."

Because she's not ready yet, he knows this and so does Elizabeth. She's twenty-four, just starting out, and there's a lot more he knows she wants to do that he doesn't want to hold her back from.

When she's found herself, he'll be waiting.

Elizabeth stoops to scoop up Marcia, wincing as her knees pop. She looks, abruptly, at a section of the grass, the unadorned lawn, and with a lurch of his heart he recognises the perimeter of the alarm, the slight swell of the grounds. Remembers a girl on that grass, a smoke between her lips, the taste of chap-stick.

"You've grown up," Elizabeth says, and she's still looking at that lawn. Turning, he studies the house; notes Emily's bedroom to the right wing, and more notably and—he feels like a fool when he realizes—Elizabeth's directly behind them on the second floor. "I didn't know if you would. When Emily told me what had happened, about this little lass… I didn't know if you could help her. I fully intended upon stepping in if you couldn't."

"But I did." He voice is tight, strained. She knew all along.

A slow nod is his answer, and Marcie wraps her arms around her Grandma's neck, whispering something softly into the fragile skin of her throat. "You did. And you'll continue to do so, I'm sure of it."

He's twenty-seven at that moment, and not a boy anymore. Nor ever again.

"What are you thinking about?" Emily asks him, before they sleep. "You look all pensive."

He thinks carefully before he answers. When he does, she raises an eyebrow at him and doesn't answer, and that's fine because he didn't need one anyway.

"A broken mug," he says, and laughs.

 **.**

 **November**

Aaron turns twenty-eight, and promises he'll be home that night to celebrate, despite his nose wrinkling unhappily at the reminder of the passing years. She knows he's probably not that worried about it, but teases him anyway by buying him a slate-grey tie and laughing herself sick at the look of horror on his face when he opens it.

Then he leaves for work. And he isn't home that night and the roast she bought is forgotten in their freezer, because that's the day they fly to Boston.

She sees it on the news before he has a chance to call her and tell her not to panic, and for thirty agonising seconds, she can't breathe around the terror and the horror and the sheer impossibility of the headline.

 _…_ _FBI task force headed by Quantico's Behavioural Analysis Unit…_

 _…_ _It's unknown if anyone was inside at the time of the blast, but units were on the scene…_

 _…_ _Emergency services are responding but urge everyone to please avoid the area…_

The bullet around her neck is heavy, and she should have given him one, why didn't she? Distantly, Marcie is screaming, screaming, screaming, but Emily can't hear her over the sound of Taps playing on loop. _How will they do it?_ she thinks, and looks at her phone, the silent phone, and Marcie is standing in her playpen, face red and snot on her lip, still screaming, or will they knock? Uniformed units?

 _We're sorry Ma'am,_ she imagines them saying, in that long, frozen, horrible moment, _he was a hero, a hero, did you know he was a hero? Ma'am ma'am ma'am._ Just like he used to call her.

Her phone rings. The sound startles her and she shrieks, just a small noise, and it scares Marcie even more. She's bawling, sobbing, going to make herself sick from hysteria, and Emily ignores the phone in favour of walking to her daughter.

"No, no," Marcie sobs, shaking her head, dark hair sticking to the grimy trails of tears on her cheeks. "Want Daddy."

Oh.

The phone rings. And rings and rings, and she finally answers it.

It's him.

He's alive.

 **.**

 **December**

This is the December of endless memorials, funerals. Four FBI agents and a civilian lost.

Gideon lasts three weeks before Boston finally destroys him. His breakdown becomes the stuff of legends within the new recruits, and their halls are filled with new recruits because four of them have died and another six quit at the reminder of their own mortality. Gideon gone too.

Among the senior agents, none of them mention it. They all know that it could be any of them, one day it could be, one day it probably will be.

Hotch just thinks it's cruel that a career like Gideon's ended like this.

Emily accompanies him to every funeral and flinches every time they say the word _hero_ and he knows she's picturing his death, his funeral, his coffin borne by six. He knows she is, because he's doing the same for her, despite the scarcity of her fieldwork and her competence with a weapon.

It doesn't feel right to celebrate Christmas that year, not when even the Bureau doesn't bother with a cursory attempt at decoration, and the only new decor in the bullpen is the four new pictures framed on the wall. It feels odd. Like Christmas is out of place, like death is a heartbeat away, and the New Years can't possibly be just around the corner. There has to be more to 1998 than this.

But there's not.

It just ends.


	5. 1999

**Chapter Five: 1999**

 ** _Special thanks to a guest reviewer who pointed out the wacky maths at the beginning of this fic! Hopefully it's all fixed up now but hey, I'm a writer, not a mathematician! Feel free to PM me with improvements or corrections any time, readers, no need to post as a guest! I'm always up for fixing my mistakes :)_**

 **.**

 **.**

 **January**

They struggle without Gideon. Hotch finds himself stepping up, speaking out. He also finds that people naturally follow where he leads. Morgan only fights him in private, when he knows no one is looking, and only when he believes he's right. Hotch doesn't want to discourage that, so he allows it. JJ never questions him, but he trusts her judgement and her morality, so he assumes that he's probably doing something right.

They miss Gideon. His office stands empty and dusty, the blinds closed, a testament to how they could all end, and Hotch wonders if he's coming back at all. If he'll blame him if he doesn't. He doesn't think he will.

The strain of it leeches into his home life.

"Don't talk to me like that," Emily snaps one night, out of nowhere, and he's startled because all he'd done was comment on the report she was translating.

"Like what?" he asks, staring at her. Marcie looks up from her serious duty of precariously stacking blocks on top of each other, and cocks her head to listen better with her right ear, her eyes locked on Emily's mouth.

"Like you're Hotch," she says, standing up and walking away to the kitchen. "We're not your team, Aaron. Don't use that voice on us."

He hadn't even realized he'd been doing it.

"Mommy mad," Marcie tells her blocks sadly, and Sergio chooses that moment to stick his paw out from under the couch and send them tumbling into her lap. "Uh oh."

"Uh oh," Hotch agrees, and climbs down there to help her rebuild what's been broken.

 **.**

 **February**

For once, it's her getting home later than him; her crawling into bed still wired, still keyed up, and finding him sleepy and pliable against her. It's cruel, probably, to wake him, but at least she's gentle about it.

Sort of.

She coaxes him against her until he's shivering slightly, eyes glazed, and then she takes what she needs from him and then some more. It's hungry on her behalf, slow and careful on his, and even though they're on different wavelengths, it's still _good_. She comes twice, once from his mouth and once from his fingers, and both times she does so with his name on her lips.

Afterwards, they're a sticky, messy tangle of arms and legs and his head is against her chest, his lashes brushing her skin, and he could be asleep but she knows he isn't. He's listening. Listening to her heartbeat, to the silence of their home, to the quiet sounds of their lives together.

And in that moment, she's reckless, more reckless than she's ever been. More reckless than when she was twenty and she snuck out of her room in the middle of the night to trigger an alarm to wheedle him from his professional post and into her restless life. More reckless than the night, so many months later, when she knocked in his door in the middle of winter and shattered him.

More reckless than some point in the middle of those two times, when she'd fallen helplessly in love with him.

"Marry me," she whispers into his ear, nipping the lobe, and feels his mouth turn upwards in a startled smile. "I dare you."

"Who could say no to that?" he replies simply, and that's all it takes.

Reckless, maybe, but she never regrets it.

 **.**

 **March**

Gideon comes back. He's not alone.

"This is Spencer Reid," he says, and pushes forward a kid Hotch would swear is eighteen at the most, hiding his terrified 'deer-in-the-headlights' expression behind thick coke-bottle glasses and a shaggy haircut that hangs in his face when he ducks his head. "He's a student from Caltech I've borrowed for a while, just to get the hang of the place."

He's not on active duty, he's just 'consulting', so no one really argues with him and the sight of the hapless Dr. Reid trailing after him like a lost puppy becomes familiar.

"You're doing a good job, Aaron," Gideon says one night, when it's only Hotch left in the office, his expression serious. "You really stepped up."

"Thank you, Sir," Hotch says politely, and Gideon nods and walks away without another word.

It's odd and almost unsettling, but Gideon rarely does things without purpose, Hotch knows.

He just has to be patient.

 **.**

 **April**

She's gotten used to taking lunch alone. Her co-workers are friendly, welcoming, and all decidedly… academic. Which is fine.

But linguistic facts don't really make the risotto go down easier, so eventually she gets used to slipping down to a nearby cafe for a sandwich and a coffee to eat on a bench outside the Bureau.

JJ finds her one week, glancing and spotting her as she makes her own way back to work with a bottle of water and a dreamy expression. "Oh, hello," JJ says with a smile. "Mind if I join you?"

The next day she brings Penelope and Penelope brings muffins.

The next week, Morgan finds all of them.

"Well, the whole gang is here now," Emily finally says, when she's more used to the bench being occupied by profilers than not. "Except the dorky one. _And Aaron,_ she thinks, grinning while imagining Aaron sprawled on the grass next to Penelope or leaning against the fencing with Morgan.

The next day, JJ drags Spencer Reid down, and he brings with him more facts on linguistics than her entire unit combined.

Truth be told, she doesn't really mind.

 **.**

 **May**

"I think," Emily says suddenly one morning, and she's standing in front of the mirror with her pants on and shirt off and frowning intently, "That we may have fucked up again, Aaron."

He's confused for a moment until he steps up beside her and notices the way her hand is resting against her stomach, the barest hint of weight on her slim figure. He wouldn't have noticed at all except she's fitter than she's ever been, muscled and firm where before she was soft, and he's spent the past few months glorying in that.

"Well," he says finally. "What do we do?"

What they do, and Hotch is gleeful because he's wanted this for longer than he'll ever admit to, is tell Marcie that for a very late birthday gift, they've gotten her a sibling. He's gotten a bit lost in the mail, but he should be here… oh, around October.

They regret that later when Marcie is five and promptly requests that for her birthday that year, she would very much like an _older_ sister instead of a little brother, please and thank you.

But that's later.

 **.**

 **June**

David Rossi may have left the BAU, but he never quite left their lives.

"Hey, who else am I gonna groom to call me Granddaddy?" he says, rocking up on their doorstep one weekend with a bag of insanely overpriced coffee and his usual smug air. Marcie ignores both of these gifts and instead totters through his legs, wrapping both arms around his knee and _wheee'ing_ as he continues walking as though there's not a toddler clinging to him.

"I'm not calling you Granddaddy," Aaron says, appearing down the stairs, brow furrowed together.

Emily considers it. "I might if you make it worth my while," she says eventually, and winks when Aaron stares at her.

"Not as long as that man carries a gun you won't," Rossi retorts, shooting Hotch a mock terrified glance. "Now, Tiny Hotch, where do your parents keep all the fun stuff?"

Marcie leads him to her toy-box with unerring speed.

 **.**

 **July**

"So," Gideon says one day, striding into Hotch's office with the distinct air of continuing a conversation they'd only left off a minute ago. "When you began here, Aaron, you were a reckless and dangerously over-confident agent with the potential to become Unit Chief by thirty-five. I distinctly recall that being said about you."

Hotch leans back in his chair. Gideon called him Aaron, so this isn't a disciplinary session, but he's really quite lost for what it actually _is_.

"Thirty, actually," he corrects, and gestures to the spare chair in front for his Unit Chief to sit.

Gideon hums. "I'm coming back," he says finally, and meets Hotch's gaze with the same piercing expression that used to have the younger Hotch quailing and desperately going over whether or not he'd done something wrong recently, or more likely, if it was possible that Gideon could have found out. "This job is my life. I belong here. But I don't belong _here_."

And he puts something on the desk between them. A shiny nameplate. Once, Rossi had one just like it. This is Gideon's.

Hotch stares at it.

"So," Gideon continues, and folds his arms looking satisfied and smug. "How about Unit Chief by twenty-nine?"

No one is surprised when he accepts.

 **.**

 **August**

She's seven months pregnant and this one isn't being as kind to her as Marcie was. He's—because it is a he, and Aaron suggests Jack as the name, not seeing the irony—distinctly eager to begin life, kicking and squirming and growing exponentially until she's pretty sure she's the size of a small horse and just as cranky to boot.

"At least you were polite while gestating," she complains to Marcie when Marcie is sitting on her outstretched legs patting curiously at Emily's belly with her chubby hands. "I mean, you were an impatient little shit when you decided to arrive, but before that you were delightful."

"Jack?" Marcie asks her, pointing to her stomach, and Emily nods and closes her eyes. "It Jack."

"Yeah, kiddo. It's Jack. And he's a right pain in my butt."

She feels awkward, out-of-place in her own body, and there's no time she feels more unwieldy then when she's naked and Aaron is studying the changes being wrought upon her. Covering herself with her bathrobe quickly before exiting the en-suite into the bedroom that night, she finds him waiting for her.

"Stop that," he scolds, his mouth twitching downwards, and tugs her hands gently away from her front. She closes her eyes, not wanting to see his eyes on the marks on her stomach, round where it used to be flat, but craving his hands on her despite this discomfort. Keeping her eyes closed, she focuses on his trailing fingers, the rate of his breathing, the steady warmth of his body as he steps closer. "Don't hide from me."

And he proves that later that night, laying her on the bed and bringing his lips to her stomach, her breasts, her thighs, whispering exactly what he thinks of her while she struggles to hold herself together. He's always gentle, always protective, even when she wants him to be rough, to not treat her like she's fragile, but tonight she treasures his circumspection. She treasures him. She treasures him as he kneels between her legs and when he uses his mouth at first and then his fingers to make her cry out once, twice, and then slowly, so slowly, works his way inside her.

She remembers, distantly, a bathroom and his hands on her hips as he swayed his way into her body with even strokes, and she remembers staring at his holster on the bath and imagining the cold touch of the barrel on her body.

No lie, there's been a few times since that she's imagined that, fantasized, even coaxed him into it once (and she shivers now, tightening around him as she recalls that and the intense, half-hungry-half-frightened look on his face as he'd complied), but tonight it doesn't hold any power. Instead, she stares into his face; the concentrated interest in his gaze only slightly dulled by desire, the glide of his hand braced gently on her stomach, the awkward push-pull sensation of having him standing to get around her cumbersome shape.

She pictures that stare and the love layered within it, and the hands that she's seen holding a gun and a baby and her heart, and so many things in between, and she quietly promises not to hide herself from him anymore, because he's bared it all to her.

 **.**

 **September**

It's more autumn than summer, but the heat lingers and the cooler breaks down. As it turns out, Emily apparently likes her showers hot but her heat non-existent, and her temper shortens as the weekend grinds on.

Eventually, he packs the miserable Emily into the car, clips Marcie into her car-seat, loads the back, and takes the whole sorry-motley lot to the beach to be grumpy at people other than him and the long-suffering Sergio.

"Ohhh," Marcie gasps, as soon as he lifts her from her seat and she spots the ocean, her dark eyes bugging open in surprise. "It a big bath, Da!"

"The very biggest," he assures her, adjusting her swimsuit, and she wriggles with delight, making the whole process a lot more agonising. Emily watches, smiling, the frustration sliding from her face and shoulders like as though coaxed away by the slow ebb of the tide.

The beach is mostly empty, the sand retaining the heat of the day even as it chugs steadily onward. When Hotch leads Marcie into the water, holding her hand tight against the slow waves, the water is still warm around his legs. It laps at Marcie's waist, splashing along merrily with her laughter. Emily follows, sedately, watching them both without saying a word.

Their daughter learns about the perils of drinking sea-water, they're all coated uncomfortably with gritty sand, Emily finds a shell the perfect size for Sergio to knock from whatever shelf or counter she tries to display it on, and they're all tired, worn, and absolutely happy by the end of it.

"Wait," Emily says, stalling him as he goes to close the car door, Marcie already asleep in her salt-and-sand streaked bundle of swim-suit and towelling. Fingers tangle as she takes his hand, tilting her chin back towards the ocean. "Hey, let's just…wait."

And they do. The sun lowers slowly, the heat receding with it.

 **.**

 **October**

Emily turns twenty-five the day they bring home Jack from the hospital, twice as big as his sister was when she was born and twice as loud to boot.

Sergio is affronted by this squalling new member of the family, Marcie is intrigued, and Hotch is pretty sure they're never going to have another quiet moment.

He wouldn't have traded it for the world.

 **.**

 **November**

They're having a BAU Thanksgiving because Emily wants to remind Hotch's team that's there's more to the man than he lets them see at work; that there's a man under those suits and glares and stifled smiles.

She invites Penelope and JJ, Morgan arrives with a wink and a deliciously flavoured potato bake he refuses to give up the recipe for, and even Gideon arrives, toting a bottle of wine and Spencer Reid. Rossi, as always, is late and completely okay with being so.

"Party can start now, my ducklings," he booms as he walks in the door and envelopes Emily in a hug that's a touch affectionate but mostly just annoying, and she takes the chance to jab him in the ribs. "Where are the little Hotshots?"

"It Wossy," Marcie announces from her high chair, peering through the door at him. There's a block toy in front of her, different coloured holes for different shaped blocks, and she's currently trying to ram a sphere through the triangle opening. Emily gives her points for effort. Aaron had been helping her with it, but now he's dealing with Jack squalling up the hall with a demand to be involved, and the only other person left at the table is the rapidly blinking Reid.

"Shit yes it is," Rossi says, ruffling her dark hair and brushing his lips against her head. "Uncle Wossy demanding hugs, get in here." Marcie giggles and wraps her arms around his neck, clinging on monkey-like to him.

"Don't swear in front of the three-year-old, Dave," Gideon calls out from the kitchen. "They have memories like elephants."

"Pssh," he scoffs. "I bet she doesn't even remember my name when I walk out the door, do you kiddo? Probably thinks I'm Gideon."

"Wossy," Marcie says, scowling and ramming the circle into the triangle. Violently. Emily smirks. "Uh oh."

"Uh oh," Emily agrees, and scoops her out of the high chair to deposit her into Reid's lap. He was beginning to look entirely too comfortable. Marcie squeaks, Reid squeaks, and Emily dumps the toy on top of them both. "Here, genius, teach her shapes."

He tentatively picks up the triangle, looking from Marcie to Emily as though for guidance. "Come on, kid," Morgan says with a snort, "She's not gonna bite."

"In like this," he suggests, and drops the triangle in with a _clink_. Marcie examines it. "See. Now the sphere, in here…"

"Nope," Marcie says, and clonks it onto the triangle hole again.

"Oh good," Aaron says, coming up behind her and handing her the freshly changed Jack, tucking his chin onto her shoulder and smiling at the child at the table. And the bigger child holding her. "Looks like we have a Reid-level genius in the family."

Emily snorts, and tries not to show how giddy she is with the joy of this moment, these people, this life. "Yeah well, that genius is eating Reid's tie."

"Oh," Reid says, looking down. "Ah. Marcie, no."

"Marcie yes," Marcie corrects, and hits him with the sphere.

 _Maybe_ , Emily thinks, rescuing the man she's very aware that Gideon is grooming to be a big bad special agent from the scary toddler bullying him, _we should ask him to babysit…_

 **.**

 **December**

It's the little things that make up his life, but to him they're not little at all.

They're not minute, nor inconsequential. They're significant. All-important. It's Marcie learning to count to three, and Jack taking his first steps when they're both there to see it. It's Emily being there when he closes his eyes at night, and there still when he opens them in the morning. It's a single day of many when he walks into the kitchen and his family are waiting.

It's his work, his team, his focus.

Thirteen hours before 1999 ticks into 2000, he breaks his final mug.

It's startling. It's the brush of his hand over the table, the smallest of nudges, and it tumbles to the ground. Emily chases Sergio and Marcie out of scatter range of the tiny ceramic shards, and he examines the impact pattern critically.

Aaron Hotchner, despite the complaints of the people under him that he can be stiff, humourless, unyielding, doesn't always abide solely by habit.

"Never mind," Emily says, nudging the handle with her foot and smiling at him, the cocky, crooked smile she gives when she's thinking about exactly this and so much more, and glorying in the promise of it all. "We'll clean it up together."

And they do.

It's not small.


End file.
